Media Gallery

How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? Poet and scholar Jane Wong raised these questions with her digital multimedia project, The Poetics of Haunting. For the last workshop event of 2017, Wong and poets Carlina Duan, ChristineShan Shan Hou, and Muriel Leung read work and share images that boldly invoke historical and familial ghosts so that we may feel their presence.

Carlina Duan’s debut collection of poetry I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) wrestles with the growing pains of Chinese American girlhood and racial consciousness. Franny Choi writes, “In I Wore My Blackest Hair, [Duan’s] speaker navigates diaspora and its incumbent losses — of family, of language, of face — with unflinching care, revealing complex textures and concrete magic.” Carlina is a 2016 Fulbright grant recipient and an MFA Candidate at Vanderbilt University. Her work has been published in Uncommon Core, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Check out her poems about her father, silence, and the echo of “Who Let the Dogs Out” on a schoolbus in The Margins.

A garden, an intimate and intense look at being a lonely girl, and a shape-shifting feminist spiritual quest of imagined histories, Christine Shan Shan Hou’s Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Press, 2017) creates strange and mutable new generational mythologies. The Poetry Project writes, “Community Garden for Lonely Girls invites readers of all gender persuasions to momentarily suspend the Enlightenment imperative to cultivate their individual plots and embrace the feeling of being disposable — and disposed into — a mass flowerpot.” Work from Community Garden for Lonely Girls appears in Jane Wong’s Poetics of Haunting Digital Project: “We talk over each other all the time. We exchange ghosts in the details.” Christine is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her previous publications include “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011) a collaborative artists’ book with artist Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio 2010).

Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016) is an arresting account of loss and the unresolved nature of mourning and making art. Publisher’s Weekly calls it, “an elegant, elegiac debut collection set in a haunted and highly ritualized space.” Cathy Park Hong writes, “Leung’s poems can be unbearably intimate yet also epic, traversing into the speculative and gothic, as she animates her grief into a macabre and exquisitely haunted underworld…”; Hyperallergic writes “She meets the violence of her grief with poems populated by holograms, robots, and ghosts.” A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a contributing editor to the Bettering American Poetry anthology and is also Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.

Jane Wong is a poet, scholar and the creator of the Poetics of Haunting digital project. Inspired by her scholarly manuscript on the of ghosts in contemporary Asian American poetry, Going Toward the Ghost, the project grew into a TED Talk, a digital collection of haunting poems, a record of with conversations with Bhanu Kapil and Sally Wen Mao, and a piece written in conversation with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s archive. Of her powerful debut poetry collection, Overpour (Action Books, 2016) Full Stop writes, “There isn’t without arresting imagery and a suggestion of forceful, generative life.” A former Kundiman and Fulbright Fellow, Wong is an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University. Check out her poem from Overpour, “Pastoral Power” and her conversation with Sally Wen Mao about the book in The Margins.

NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY

*The space is wheelchair accessible. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.

Events

Join us to celebrate the launch of Marianna's Beauty Salon, Bushra Rehman's first collection of poetry. Rehman is author of Corona, a dark comedy on being South Asian American and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” This collection spans twenty years of poetic work. Rehman will be joined on stage by Quincy Scott Jones (The T-Bone Series), Sadia Shepard (The Girl from Foreign) and Jai Dulani (The Revolution Starts at Home.) DJ Rekha will close the night with a special music set.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens, but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her first novel Corona was noted by Poets & Writers among 2013’s Best Debut Fiction and featured in the LA Review of Books as a work of notable South Asian American Literature. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” Rehman’s first Young Adult novel, the prequel-midquel to Corona is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan. She. is creator of the popular writing workshop series for POC and allies: Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.
DJ Rekha (born Rekha Malhotra) is a DJ, producer, curator, and educator. She has performed spaces across the globe including the inaugural Women’s March and Obama’s White House. Rekha has done remixes for artists that range from AR Rahman to Meredith Monk to Priyanka Chopra and curated events for Celebrate Brooklyn and Central Park Summerstage. You can hear her weekly podcast Bhangra and Beyond on www.btrtoday.com/listen/bhangraandbeyond
Jai Dulani is a writer and interdisciplinary storyteller. His work has appeared in SAMAR, bustingbinaries, Black Girl Dangerous, Teachers & Writers, and the anthology, “Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic.” Dulani is co-editor of the anthology "The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities." An alum of the Austin Project, Kundiman and VONA, Dulani has also been a BCAT/ Rotunda Gallery Multi-Media Artist-in-Residence and was a 2016 Open City Fellow through the Asian American Writers Workshop. He loves Bushra's writing, especially her poetry, and has been lucky to be her friend and student over the years.
Quincy Scott Jones’ first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press, in 2009. His work has appeared in the African American Review, The North American Review, African Voices, and The Feminist Wire, as well as the anthologies such as Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press 2014), Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky (Jacar Press, 2016), Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women (Sable Books, 2016), and Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives (2Leaf Press, 2017). With Nina Sharma, he co-created the Nor’easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series and is currently the Coordinator of the Writing Center at Grace Church School.
Sadia Shepard's first book, The Girl from Foreign, was published by The Penguin Press in 2008. Her other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal Magazine and The New York Times. As a documentary producer, Shepard’s credits include The September Issue and The Education of Muhammad Hussain for HBO. She teaches at Wesleyan University and leads AAWW's Profile This! photography and creative writing workshop for Muslim, South Asian and Arab youth at the Arab American Association of New York.
This event is presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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Join us for a reading featuring two fiction writers whose memoirs about illness offer stories of survival, pain and transformation. Sick is Porochista Khakpour’s grueling, emotional journey — as a woman, as an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems — through the chronic illness that perpetually left her a victim of anxiety, living a life stymied by an unknown condition. MacArthur ‘genius’ grant winner Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a love letter to the books that have kept her alive through depression and an intimate portrait of an immigrant writer that asks why write, and why live? Don’t miss this event with two of the most remarkable voices in fiction on being made and making themselves, moderated by Elif Batuman.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel The Last Illusion was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others. Currently, she is guest faculty at VCFA and Stonecoast's MFA programs as well as Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review. Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City’s Harlem.
Yiyun Li is the author of four works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband and their two sons.
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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